Alice suspected Paul couldn’t really picture his father, just like she couldn’t picture Paul when he was away. Maybe that was the case with people you wanted more than was good for you.
Dying is as natural as being born, and all of us have to face it someday. Some sooner than others. It's difficult to understand the meaning of it all. The question isn't, 'Why do we die?' The correct question is, 'Why do we live?
I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys: the smells of summer, the part of town I loved, a certain evening sky, Marie's dresses and the way she laughed.
To wish for the happiest days is to wish for a season of sorrow; for it is only after prolonged, wintry darkness that the summer sun appears to shine at its brightest.
In the morning light, I remembered how much I loved the sound of wind through the trees. I laid back and closed my eyes, and I was comforted by the sound of a million tiny leaves dancing on a summer morning.
from the days when it was always summer in Eden,to these days when it is mostly winter in fallen latitudes, the world of a man has invariably gone one way Charles Darnay’s way the way of the love of a woman
I want to reach back into my history with a grade-school pink eraser, scrubbing away my decisions like mistakes on a math test. Too bad I drew my mistakes in ink.
The last thing Pa and Big Ma wanted to hear was how we made a grand Negro spectacle of ourselves thirty thousand feet up in the air around all these white people.
Adán fell asleep to these stories and slept like the dead until the sun struck him in the eyes and the whole long, wonderful summer day started again with the smell of fresh tortillas, manchaca, chorizo, and fat, sweet oranges.
Imagine a delicious glass of summer iced tea. Take a long cool sip. Listen to the ice crackle and clink. Is the glass part full or part empty? Take another sip. And now?
I lost a child," she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. "I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.
After all these years, his best friend is malaria. Even on the brink of an Alaska summer, it comes calling: a bone-deep chill one night, a ministry of sweat the next. Calling him back to old battles.
One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.
She bought seeds and raided nurseries and mulched and composted and spent full days with her hands full of earth, coaxing life our of the dry, dull grass my father had spent years pushing a mower over.
I closed my eyes under the fluroescent lights and tried to make another birthday wish, a onetime do-over, a rebate, a trade-in on the kitchen sink kiss that started everything, offered up for just one last miracle.
We were both young when I first saw you. I close my eyes and the flashback starts. I'm standin' there on a balcony in summer air.
It was the summer just before we both turned twenty. Before life began to chip away at us like a sculptor into marble, reducing us from endless unformed possibility into the women we would ultimately become.
Listen up, Little Miss Fun Hater. Off the record, if it wasn't for our school's strict but smarmy anti-bullying laws, I would bitch-slap you into next summer.
I guess I felt attached to my weakness. My pain and suffering too. Summer light, the smell of a breeze, the sound of cicadas - if I like these things, why should I apologize?
Though the body is its genesis, a poem is the vision of a process Carved in space, vision your poor eye's single armor against winter spring summer fall
The summer before my third year of law school, I worked at a law firm in Washington, D.C. I turned 25 that July, and on my birthday, my father happened to be playing in a local jazz club called Pigfoot and invited me to join him. I hadn't spent a bir...